English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (XIVth Century)

by J. J. Jusserand

Statues did not always act so graciously, but were guided by circumstances, as was seen in the church of St. Paul-extra-muros at Rome. A visitor, according to the relation of the learned Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford, had insulted the image of the saint, saying: “ ‘Why hast thou got a sword, I mean to have thy sword,’ and he was trying to take it out of the hands of the statue. But through God’s doing, the statue raised its sword on the impious man, and clove his head to the chin; and then death followed. This happened at the time when Eugene IV was Pope of Rome, and a witness of the scene reported it to me; this witness was a beadel of the said Pope, called Master Erasmus Fullar, a priest of the kingdom of Hungary.”[478]

II

Apart from pilgrimages, in fashion but for a time, English people usually went to Durham to visit the tomb of the holy Confessor Cuthbert, and the place where was kept his ever-victorious banner; to the shrine of King Edward the Confessor in Westminster; to St. Albans, St. Edmund’s Bury, St. David’s, on account of the saints after whom these towns are named; to Chichester, to worship the body of St. Richard the Bishop; to Glastonbury, with its holy thorn-tree, and its church founded {347} by St. Joseph of Arimathea; to Waltham, where a cross of black marble had been miraculously found in the time of King Knut. Lincoln, York, Peterborough, Hayles with its Holy Blood, Winchester (for St. Swithin, who, among other merits, had had that of being a bridge builder), Holywell, Beverley with its St. John, and a number of other places,[479] shrines and miraculous and wishing wells had also attractions for the pilgrim; but none could stand comparison with Walsingham and Canterbury.

At Walsingham there were a church and a chapel, now destroyed, the latter with a miraculous bejewelled statue of the Virgin, and some of her milk, the chapel being exactly similar, it was said, to the Santa Casa of Loretto, which was a wonder in itself, for the English copy had been built in the eleventh century, long before the Casa was heard of. Owing to innumerable gifts the place was resplendent with gold and precious stones. Visiting Cologne and the famous shrine of the wise men of the East, Roger Ascham writes: “The three kings be not so rich, I believe, as was the Lady of Walsingham.”[480] People came in crowds; many among the British kings came too;[481] the road leading to Walsingham was called the palmers’ way, and chapels were built along its line. The town was full of inns, hospitals, and religious buildings, as was usually the case with the more famous of these places.

The milk and the image, as most of the pilgrimage statues, were destroyed at the Reformation, some of the wooden ones being burnt like the heretics, or with them, at Smithfield, as happened when Friar Forest died at {348} the stake.[482] The gold and silver ones were turned to more practical uses. “I have pullyd down,” Dr. London, one of the Visitors of religious houses, writes to Thomas Cromwell, “the image of our Lady at Caversham, wherunto wasse great pilgremage. The image ys platyd over with sylver, and I have putte yt in a cheste fast lackyd (locked) and naylyd uppe, and by the next bardge that commyth from Redyng to London yt shall be browght to your Lordeschippe. I have also pullyd down the place she stode in with all other ceremonyes, as lights, schrds (shrouds), crowchys (crosses), and imagies of wex hangyng about the chapel, and have defacyed the same thorowly in exchuyng of any farther resortt thedyr. . . . At Caversham ys a propre lodginge wher the chanon lay, with a fayer garden and an orchard mete to be bestowed upon som frynde of your lordeschip’s in thees parties.”[483]

In especially large numbers people hired horses at Southwark, with relays at Rochester, and set out for St. Thomas of Canterbury. This was the highroad to the continent; a regular service of hired horses had been established along it. Twelvepence was paid from Southwark to Rochester, twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury, sixpence from Canterbury to Dover. The horses were branded in a prominent manner, so that unscrupulous travellers should not be tempted to quit the road and appropriate their steeds.[484] The sanctuary of St. Thomas had, indeed, a world-wide reputation.

We can scarcely realize now the thrill of horror that went throughout Christendom, as far as the Levant, as far as Iceland, when the news came that Archbishop {349} Thomas Becket,[485] Legate of the Pope, former chancellor of England, had been massacred in his cathedral of Canterbury by four knights of Henry II, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 1170, his brain and blood splashing the pavement. Everything combined to increase the enormity of the crime; the holiness of the place, which should have afforded sanctuary, even to a murderer, the rank of the victim in the hierarchy of the Church, the dying man’s brave and pious words, the presence of the cross born at his side by his assistant, Edward Grim, himself severely wounded, and, above all, the fame and character of the prelate, an archbishop Turpin of real life, who, like the companion of Roland, and while already engaged in holy orders, had proved a plucky military leader, unimpeachable, moreover, from the moral point of view, and fearless throughout his life. Like the Archbishop of Reims of the “Song of Roland,” whose brain had flowed down his face,[486] he had died at the hands of barbarians, who had not, however, the excuse of being infidels.

Rarely did a single act cause such universal indignation. Public opinion proclaimed Thomas a saint even before the Pope could take action, which he did, however, with a promptitude rare in such cases, canonization being proclaimed in February, 1173. The body was scarcely buried in the crypt of the cathedral,[487] than pilgrims came to it, their numbers ceaselessly increasing. The life of the archbishop was the subject of numberless miniatures,[488] {350} sculptures,[489] painted windows. Some of the latter, dating back to the thirteenth century, still remain at Canterbury, Sens, Chartres, and other places. Matthew Paris wrote and illuminated with his own hand, Walsingham tells us, a biography of the archbishop; churches dedicated to him multiplied in England and out of England: “On the heights of Fourvières,” wrote Dean Stanley, “overlooking the city of Lyons, is a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Four years before his death, it is said, he was walking on the terraced bank of the river underneath, and being asked to whom the chapel should be dedicated, he replied, ‘To the next martyr,’ on which his companion remarked, ‘Perhaps, then, to you.’”[490]

The prophecy was fulfilled. Entirely renovated, and forming now part of the pilgrimage church at Fourvières, such a chapel still exists, still dedicated to St. Thomas; it has been allotted to the fraternity of “Notre Dame de Compassion” for their exercises, which consist chiefly in praying for the conversion of England. On the threshold are engraved four riming Latin lines: “Happy the place, happy the church where Thomas’s memory survives; happy the land which gave birth to the prelate, happy that which received him, an exile.”[491]

Churches dedicated to him were especially numerous in Normandy, from which his family came, a chapel at {351} Caen bearing the grim name of “Saint Thomas l’Abattu” (the stricken down). His life was told in verse and prose, in Latin, French, Icelandic, the most noteworthy of those lives being that in French verse by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, as remarkable for its literary as for its historical value, the author, a contemporary, having taken as much pains to ascertain the truth as would the most conscientious of the historians of to-day.[492] He had begun writing two years after the event, and had remodelled several times his poem because new documents, of which several are versified into his text, or new facts had come to his knowledge. He established himself at “Chantorbire,” where every man, every stone had been a witness, and he appealed, in order to learn the truth, to the friends, the servants, the sister of Saint Thomas. His work was thereby delayed, but he preferred that: